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Saving: A doctor's struggle to help his children

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"Candidly engaging, emotional poignant, impressively informative, and ultimately inspiring,  A Doctor's Struggle to Help His Children  is an extraordinary memoir and one that will be of extraordinary interest to anyone facing the often daunting task of securing appropriate and adequate health care for their own families." — Midwest Book Review Why do we fall ill? How do we get better? When his two-year-old develops epilepsy, Shane Neilson, a doctor, struggles to obtain timely medical care for his son.  Saving  shares his family's journey through the medical system, and also Shane's own personal journey as a father who feels powerless when faced with his child's illness. It entwines these stories with Shane's personal history of mental illness as a child and his professional experience with disability. By exploring the theme of family, Shane Neilson manages to show that, over time, it is possible to not only escape the wreckage of the past, but to celebrate living with disability in the present. "Shane Neilson is a brilliant writer ... There hasn’t been such a poignant and harrowing memoir of fatherhood in Canada since Ian Brown's  The Boy in The Moon. " — Karen Connelly, author of  The Change Room

224 pages, Paperback

Published May 23, 2023

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7 people want to read

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Shane Neilson

38 books10 followers

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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
8 reviews
June 18, 2023
Amazing read, one where you must concentrate and “feel” the words. A real story, written from a perspective that one is not used to and that certainly
teaches empathy on several levels.
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Author 1 book9 followers
June 3, 2025
"Call it a delusion. Hallucination. Call me crazy. But I have my very own personal Jesus. He sings to me at night. He howls at the stars, the fire on ..."

This powerful collection of essays written from the perspective of a doctor and a dad, a man living at the edges of his mind while also trying to navigate a medical system built to lock mentally ill people inside or to hold them out without support or medical help.

I loved all of it. Beginning to end.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews

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